COLLEGES

COLLEGES; Brooklyn College at Crossroads

By MALCOLM MORAN

Published: June 23, 1992

Pam White had been expecting 1992-93, her senior year at Brooklyn College, to be a special one. Next fall, she was to be the only fourth-year player on a basketball team that had gone through one of the most dramatic reversals in the country.

This past season, three years after losing a national-record 58 consecutive games, the Lady Knights had a 17-10 record. Even as the Brooklyn College athletic department failed to provide equitable treatment of women in 10 areas covered by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, enacted 20 years ago today, the team flourished.

After the Office of Civil Rights announced its findings in February on a complaint about Brooklyn College's treatment of female athletes, the college pledged to comply with the law by September. But by then, White might not have a team.

Under a proposal made this month, Brooklyn College, a part of the City University of New York, might soon disband its athletic department as part of more than $5.4 million in budget cuts, and replace it with an expanded program of recreational and intramural sports. A Different Approach

Len Roitman, the Brooklyn College athletic director, plans today to submit to the committee responsible for making the budget cuts a clarification of his plan to save the program in some form. Roitman will list options for saving the program without funding from the CUNY budget, based in part on discussions with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

His proposed program of seven men's and seven women's varsity teams does not include men's basketball. The committee could make its recommendation to the CUNY chancellor, W. Ann Reynolds, as early as tomorrow.

As administrators of the college continue to debate whether a proposed savings of $170,000 in athletic-department salaries justifies the end of the intercollegiate program, athletic officials across the country are watching and wondering if a successful Title IX complaint will bring down an entire department.

And White says she thinks about what she will do next.

"It's really hard to deal with," she said yesterday. "It'll be harder for me to go somewhere else to play. It has bothered me all along, but now it has gotten to a point where I'm really thinking about it constantly, constantly. I think it's inevitable. I think this is just an excuse to finally get rid of it."

White's perception, that the administration is acting in part to rid itself of the embarrassment caused by the national attention of its failure to comply with Title IX, has been shared by many athletic administrators. The perception, challenged as inaccurate by Brooklyn College officials, is that of a nightmare situation of equity in which no one receives the benefit of anything.

This is why the emotional struggle of a largely overlooked college athletic department has suddenly gained national importance.

At a point when the Office of Civil Rights has taken a more active public role in the enforcement of Title IX, advocates of equal opportunities for female athletes are concerned that the end of competitive athletics at Brooklyn College would convince women at other schools that the most valid of complaints can still be terribly harmful to their programs.

"I am desperately afraid that that could happen," said Linda Carpenter, a Brooklyn College professor in the physical-education department, who with Vivian Acosta both produced a 15-year study on the status of women in college sports and filed the Title IX complaint with the Federal office. "That people would say, 'Gee, Brooklyn won the strongest letter of findings ever about Title IX, and look what has happened.' "

"That would be awful," Carpenter went on, "because it is not reality. But if people perceive it as reality, then Title IX and equity get hurt."

James Loughran, the acting Brooklyn College president, said yesterday that the finding on his school last February, and the attention that resulted, was not a cause of the proposed cuts. "It was not a consideration," he said.

Loughran added that after news-media reports began to make a connection between the Title IX-related publicity earlier this year and the proposal this month to end the program, he went back to his vice presidents to double-check. When he asked them, Loughran said, the answer was always the same: When the budget question was discussed, the issue of Title IX was not raised.

Carpenter said she believes Loughran on this, but she added that the relationship between the Title IX finding, the need to comply and the proposal of elimination of the program may be more subtle.

Said Carpenter: "I do think that at least one person involved said: 'This is convenient. We can get rid of equity problems.' There's a difference between a motivating force and the side benefit as it might be perceived."

The results of the investigation of Brooklyn College by the Office of Civil Rights amounted to a startlingly complete finding of discrimination against female athletes. Many of the particular inequities cited have been generally seen as linked to the fact that in the early 1980's, at the direction of the school president, Robert Hess, who died last January, Brooklyn College made an ambitious move to Division I in basketball and other sports except for football.

The findings included the fact that women made up 30 percent of Brooklyn College's athletes while they were 56 percent of the student enrollment. The college was found to have never conducted a study to learn the athletic interests and abilities of students.

Brooklyn College's equipment budget for men's teams was nearly seven times that of the budget for the women's teams. Men's teams were found to have played more than an equivalent number of games; one example cited in the Federal finding was a men's baseball schedule of 46 games while the women's softball team played 12.

Coaches of women's teams were found to have considerably less experience than men's coaches.

Men's teams had the benefit of more experienced trainers. Men received stipends for food expenses that averaged 36 percent more than what the women received. Men's teams received considerably more publicity from the sports-information office. Men's teams received 87 percent of the money spent on recruiting. Intramurals Favored Men

Carpenter, who said she supports the idea a well-rounded intramural program, has doubts about the one at her school, based on the way it has been conducted in the past.

"It has been 98 percent male," she said of the intramurals.

"Intramurals are 'Come out and play.' Intercollegiate athletics are 'Come out and learn.' Preparation for the two is way different."

Pam White, who took part in the campus protest over the proposal to kill the athletic department, said she did not feel a sense of accomplishment.

"We got a lot of signatures on a petition," she said, "but it was like they were doing it so we would leave them alone."

If her team no longer exists, White said, she is unsure whether she will stay at Brooklyn College or attempt to finish her basketball career at another school. Under the proposal, athletes on scholarships would continue to receive that aid.

Graph: "A Study in Relative Incomes" shows comparison of average salaries for coaches of college men's teams with women's coaches, in selected sports, based on figures from a 1991 N.C.A.A. study of Division I schools.